Nielsen Norman Group — faceted navigation adds interaction cost and vocabulary/metadata maintenance "consumes significant financial and human resources"

Claim: NN/g cautions there is a tradeoff — "the extra power of faceted navigation also adds interaction cost by presenting users with more options to comprehend and manipulate" — and that vocabulary/metadata maintenance "consume significant financial and human resources."

Source: Taylor & Francis / library-science article quoting Nielsen Norman Group, "Musings on Faceted Search, Metadata, and Library Discovery Interfaces," 2023.

Confidence: Verified — independent/academic.

Why this matters for Candid: The honest cost side. The recommendation "build a structured catalogue" is not free — there is an interaction-cost overhead for users and an ongoing metadata-maintenance overhead for the business. Anchors the skip side (R2 — Skip faceted search when the inventory is small (~under 200 items), stable, and shallow; a static list is fine) and cross-links into cms-workflow.